‘The second creation’ is what Ian Wilmut called his research project in which he was the first in the world to clone an adult mammal: the sheep Dolly. It sounds a bit pompous in retrospect. But at the time, on February 22, 1997, the announcement came as a bombshell. Until then, almost no one had thought it possible that you could grow a completely new individual from one adult cell. It was as if Ira Levin’s science fiction scenario was now very close: in the book The Boys from Brazil nefarious scientists cloned dozens of little Hitlers and placed them with surrogate mothers.
Wilmut managed to effectively refute those doomsday scenarios in interviews and television appearances, helped by Dolly’s innocent appearance.
Wilmut’s childhood dream was to become a farmer; in his spare time he helped on a farm. He studied agriculture at the University of Nottingham. There he came into contact with embryo research in farm animals. He was so fascinated by it that he continued with a PhD research into the freezing of pig semen. In 1973, Wilmut was the first in the world to thaw a frozen bovine embryo and successfully transfer it to a surrogate mother. A healthy calf (Frostie) was born from this. That already gave Wilmut some fame, but it was only with Dolly that he really became world famous.
The aim of the entire cloning project was to make genetically modified farm animals easy to reproduce. Dolly was followed by clone sheep Polly, which produced a factor for blood clotting as a useful biomedical protein. But the visions of large herds of genetically modified animals producing medicines useful to humanity never materialized. These have been almost completely replaced by cell cultures in stainless steel vessels, from which the same biomedical proteins could be extracted under controlled conditions, a method that is much more in line with current pharmaceutical production methods. The Dolly project has not stood the test of time, to the frustration of Wilmut and also his close colleague Keith Campbell, who perfected the technique of cloning as a cell biologist.
Campbell died in 2012 – at a dramatic moment, namely in the week before the Nobel Prize was awarded to two other cloning pioneers, John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka. The question remains whether he would have shared in that prize if he had still lived. Campbell was regarded as the skilled technician and Wilmut as the leader of the Dolly project.
When cloning according to the Wilmut and Campbell method, laboratory technicians extract the genetic material from an egg cell, after which they fuse it with an adult body cell. In a more or less natural cell biological manner, they were able to ‘reprogram’ a fully differentiated adult cell to the embryonic state. Unlike specialized adult cells, embryonic cells have the ability to develop into every conceivable cell type, from skin cells to nerve cells.
However, in 2006, the Japanese Yamanaka discovered which molecular signals were needed to program an adult cell back to the embryonic state. Cloning for that purpose had therefore become an outdated technique.
Almost against his better judgement, Wilmut continued to promote cloning. With the cloning technique you could test which drugs are effective in slowing down or even preventing a disease. Wilmut said in a podcast in 2019 by The Naked Scientists. He also said that he himself suffered from Parkinson’s disease. “I do believe that treatments will come, but it may well take 50 years before treatment becomes routinely available. So people like me will probably die of Parkinson’s disease before the new treatments become available, which is frustrating to think.”
Ian Wilmut is survived by his wife (Vivienne), three children and five grandchildren.
A version of this article also appeared in the September 16, 2023 newspaper.